Yes Casablanca is included in VS 2013, a snap of our '1.0' release here on CodePlex. So if you want the latest version you have to get it here from CodePlex. I'm a little confused by your second part of your question here. We haven't tried it but you can
use the VS 2013 project files in to target the VS 2012 toolset with the Platform Toolset property. That is if you have VS 2012 installed on the machine as well.

pplx was created to support ppl tasks on previous versions of Visual Studio (2010) and other platforms (Linux). We moved pplx into ppl in VS 2013 so it is no longer needed in Casablanca. If you need to use Casablanca on Linux you still have to come to CodePlex
because we don't distribute Linux binaries, they must be built yourself.

do you plan to update to the latest version of Casablanca for full vs 2013 release? You said that what you have now (in the RC) is 1.0.

Looking through the code, it seems that you created a new thread pool for Windows version and decide not use the concurrency run time. I am just curious why? I mean, the concurrency runtime is what MS recommends to use and it is used in PPL. So why not
use it on Windows platform in Casablanca?

The Linux version uses a very basic thread pool class (threadpool.h unit), do you plan to change/improve that?

We won't be updating the version of Casablanca included in VS 2013 for the RTM release. In future updates or releases we will sync up VS to a recent stable release of Casablanca on CodePlex. CodePlex will always be the home for the latest work we are doing.

With Casablanca we are exploring making a PPL cross platform layer working on other threading environments like the Windows threadpool. We have some customers that want to utilize PPL on the threadpool instead of the concurrency runtime scheduler.

Nothing specifically at the moment, but yes we will continue to make improvements on all of our supported platforms including Linux.